{"id":31320,"date":"2025-11-07T18:23:21","date_gmt":"2025-11-07T18:23:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.trccompanies.com\/?post_type=news-and-insights&p=31320"},"modified":"2025-12-02T17:54:29","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T17:54:29","slug":"the-power-of-combining-adms-and-ami","status":"publish","type":"news-and-insights","link":"https:\/\/www.trccompanies.com\/fr\/insights\/the-power-of-combining-adms-and-ami\/","title":{"rendered":"The Power of Combining ADMS and AMI"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
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How Utilities Can Ensure Reliability and Compliance Using an Integrated Systems Approach<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n

Utilities, particularly grid operators, face an increasingly complex world. Today\u2019s volatile climate conditions can have potentially devastating impacts on utility services and costs, making outage management more challenging and increasing the need for grid hardening. Traditional one-way power flow has given way to multidirectional, decentralized networks. Balancing new regulatory requirements with cost control only increases the need for greater control and monitoring of systems.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For utilities seeking to address the challenges of the modern market, legacy systems and traditional controls are no longer sufficient. The rise of advanced distribution management systems (ADMS) as an integration platform offers the promise of interoperability and connectivity for problem-solving and grid optimization. Also, when combined with advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), utilities get a unified platform with real-time data and advanced analytics, to help leaders make better decisions and improve operations. This integrated systems approach transforms the operations landscape, enabling managers to achieve system reliability, performance and safety at scale.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Keeping the Lights Only Gets More Complicated\u00a0<\/h2>\n

Ensuring an uninterrupted and reliable energy supply has never been more crucial for utilities. Extreme weather events compound these challenges. Hurricanes and tornadoes routinely cause widespread damage, devastating infrastructure across hundreds or thousands of miles. Indeed, from 2000 to 2023, <\/span>80 percent of major power outages<\/span><\/a> were attributed to weather-related events, and the last decade saw twice as many weather-related outages as the previous one. This surge in extreme weather, including storms, wildfires, hurricanes, and cold snaps, has resulted in billions of dollars in restoration costs, infrastructure repairs, and lost revenue for utilities.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In addition to serving customers, today\u2019s grid operators must answer to state and federal regulators, who have set ambitious key performance indicators (KPIs) for reliability, efficiency, cost, and outage response. Every interruption exposes operators to regulatory pressure and even penalties for failing to meet requirements. Utilities need better tools and data to quickly understand the extent of damage, restore service, and communicate accurately with regulators and ratepayers.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In addition, communication across an organization is a significant stress point. IT and OT teams often grapple with siloed systems that lack interoperability, resulting in slower incident response, increased manual labor and slower restoration.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This operational complexity extends to resource allocation. Operations teams often lack granular, customer-level data, which limits their ability to optimize grid resources for both restoration and daily operational performance. The lack of data integration to perform real-time analytics \\ across asset management, outage response, and customer information systems further exacerbates this complexity.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Utilities must plan for seasonal demand and manage distributed energy resources such as electric vehicles and solar panels, all of which requires detailed insights into grid loads down to the individual customer profile. This requires using more data as a resource, which presents its own data management challenges.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Without the right systems working together as a single digital ecosystem, utilities can quickly become overwhelmed by the massive amounts of data generated by thousands of devices and sensors. Separate platforms, disconnected systems and manual work slow things down, especially when speed and flexibility are critical.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Disparate data, ranging from customer information to geographic and asset data, makes it challenging to achieve comprehensive, accurate, data-driven decision-making and grid management.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What does this mean for utilities? Legacy infrastructure, traditional applications and isolated strategies no longer work. Success moving forward requires cross-functional integration where real-time data meets high-powered analytics.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Challenges utilities face trying to increase reliability at affordable prices include:<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n